


when every noise appals me

by seventeencrows



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: jacobi hears kepler say all the things he doesn't want to think about, kepler says all the things that jacobi didn't want to hear, or actually, there is no such thing as being alone on the hephaestus station
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 19:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11607105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventeencrows/pseuds/seventeencrows
Summary: there is a voice, who sits on the back of your neck in the dead of night and tells you all the things you do not want to hear, all the deep dark mistakes you do not want to cop to.it isn't necessarily yours.





	when every noise appals me

**Author's Note:**

> me: i haven’t got any really concrete ideas for a fic this episode, but some good material to finish a different fic with at least
> 
> also me, two hours later: fuck
> 
> title is part of a quote from the scottish play: "how is’t with me, when every noise appals me? what hands are here! ha, they pluck out mine eyes. will all great neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? no, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

it starts, as most terrible things are wont to do, in the dark, lonely dead of night.

well—no, no, _hmm,_ that’s not right.

night is relative here and so is darkness, with your never-ending, unobstructed view of the star you spin so slowly around, with the way you wake and sleep and eat and breathe to the beat of a clock tick-tocking on the desk of a monster eight light-years away. and you are not dead, at least not really, not _exactly—_ daniel kenneth jacobi has a fifty percent success rate for survival (that you know of, that you’re _sure_ of; a year ago you thought you were one of a kind and now you check the back of your neck for a barcode, a lot number, remember that _they all thought they were the first)_ and you may not like those odds but they’re all you’ve got.

and besides, you are certainly, definitely, not alone.

eiffel is a man of small mercies, you know now, or at least of small guilts, stacking up on his shoulders like insignias and always set to tumble over. you hear the argument echo through the station when he has it out with minkowski or lovelace or hera about it but his face is somehow stony and soft both when he yanks you from the observation deck, when he finds you a prison all your own. did he see it, you wonder, the way you were crawling out of your skin in the same room as kepler—kepler, who’s wasted no time in decimating any shred of hope you’d ever had that you fucking mattered to him as anything besides a weapon, who honest-to-god _forgets you’re in the room with him sometimes,_  when he looks up and sees you there like it’s an unpleasant surprise, a fly in his soup—was it pity that got you a bunk in some shoebox room in the middle of the station with nothing but the crackle of the intercom to keep you company? are you a bargaining chip all over again, to keep kepler in his place? it doesn’t matter, really, not when you were so close to begging, _please look at me please talk to me please say something please i’m sorry i don’t know what to do—_ you’d prefer to make it out of this with your life but if you can, you’d like to salvage some dignity when you go.

but where were we? at the start, that’s right—lovelace tally-marks the day on the wall with marker now and you pretend you don’t see her fingers tremble, everybody pretends they don’t hear hera tell her again and again and again that it’s _day 1096, captain, lovelace, isabel, i promise i’m sure—_ and the straps dig into your waist, keep you pinned to the bed while you glare out the window and wait for the hiss of static and churn of station to lure you to sleep. you’re nearly there, drowsy even, pulled under just enough that the star bleeds red again through the shutter of your eyelids.

“When I tell you do to a job, Jacobi, I expect you to get it done.”

your heartbeat is the loudest thing in the room when you snap awake again. you didn’t hear it. there was nothing to hear, not a _goddamn thing,_ because nothing is there and you are alone and warren kepler is across the station and sure as shit not in this fucking room with you.

“The only reason I ever pulled you out of that bar was because you looked like you could take an order, but _clearly_ I made a _grave_ error in judgment.”

“you’re not here!” you snap, the straps cutting in tight as you struggle to turn and see an empty room. there’s nothing but the static and the star and the silence. it stretches on so long that you roll back over, scowling at the blustering corona that arcs a few million miles away.

“Of course I am,” he croons, soft and sly and relentless. “I’m here, and you’re here and—” kepler stops, hums a bar, “Oh no, no, that’s it. Just you and me.”

there’s a smile in his voice, you can hear it. you zip the blanket around you tighter, duck your head under it like you’re ten again, like it’s enough to keep the monsters away. “shut the _fuck_ up,” you hurl at him.

another pause, but even though you know it’s coming this time, it still reaches down your throat and yanks the air from your lungs. “Do you miss her, Daniel? I do. I wasn’t sure if I would, to tell you the truth, but now?” how is this happening, how can you still hear him over the roaring in your ears and the taste of bile in your mouth—“But now I think I really do. How much she did for us, how good she was at her job.” kepler stops again and you sob, clamp your hands over your mouth hard enough to make your jaw ache. “You remember how good at her job Alana was,” he continues like you’re not dying under the cadence of his drawl, not gasping for air in the pauses between his words, “right, Jacobi? At least one of you was.”

“stop,” you gasp, fingers twisting in your hair hard enough to hurt, curling in on yourself, _“please,"_ and here you are, begging after all.

is this what they meant by unraveling? zhang said it took time, didn’t she, but did she say how much? did she say how fast they came apart? what happened when they did? did they see things? did they hear things in the dead of night, strapped to their bunks with their faces in their hands and their foreheads pressed into the steel of the walls? you cover your ears in the beginning, drown out his whisper against the back of your neck, how you can almost feel his hands, but eventually, inevitably, you fall asleep. he’s always there to snap you awake with a cold chill down your spine and he never _shuts up,_ always murmuring something and chuckling under his breath and pausing just long enough for you to think it’s over before he starts again. it’s not even anything _bad,_ some nights he talks for hours about nothing at all, really, spinning stories just familiar enough that you may have heard them before, or telling long-winded jokes with punchlines that set your teeth on edge, make you remind yourself he’s half the station away. other nights he really sets in, talk about how _disappointed_ he is, not even that you fucked up, that you cost them the mission or didn’t play your cards right but that you cost him the only person who _could do her job_ and clean up after you while she was at it. what a shame, really, that maxwell wasn’t around to prop you up anymore, to make him think that you were worth all that work and those two glasses of icy booze after all, that you crumble like a house of cards without her to make you look competent.

those nights you really wonder if he’s actually here at all, if his voice isn’t just your conscience long after you thought you’d lost it, if you ever even had one at all, reading out your list of sins after all that time away. or the dear listeners, tuning right into your brainstem—you’re not all there, not all human; the only reason they didn’t _pick you,_ didn’t take you over or make you the hand of their will is because they needed someone who could actually _do their goddamn job—_ or worse yet, it’s just the _truth,_ bubbling up from where you stuffed it into the forgotten parts of you, telling you what you already know with the voice you need to hear it from.

it’s one night when you’re floating in the middle of the room, letting his voice roll over you like you remember it—it’s a good night, it’s only glass when you breathe in and not razor blades; he’s partway through a story about maxwell on a solo mission in iceland and you let the memory of her keep you from digging out your heart with your own two hands and the buckle from the bed frame—that you think you hear something. something _else,_ a hum in his words that almost sounds like static? the speaker is just over your head, arm’s reach away, and when you stretch your hand out to it, kepler’s voice stutters and stops. the speaker bumps under your hand as his voice fades, the crackle of white noise buzzing against your fingertips. he’s coming from the _overhead_ but that’s—that’s not _possible,_ that can’t be happening. kepler doesn’t have that kind of access and hera, hera would know, wouldn’t she? she’s about as competent as the hulking desktop maxwell used to have in the corner of her bedroom, chassis of the first ai program she’d ever written who’d long ago made a new home in alana’s lab in goddard’s basement, but hera would _notice_ that sort of thing, right?

“i think i’m hearing things,” you tell eiffel eventually, knuckles white on a screwdriver and eyes on the panel so you don’t have to see your hands shake. he’s still a bit pale from some stupid stunt he pulled yesterday that you’d only heard about this morning, when he spirited you away to help with what turns out to be his _punishment detail_ for playing chemist in hilbert’s old build-a-virus workshop. eiffel looks up with a flinch and he pauses, hands fluttering between you from the toolkit to the panel to the collar of his flight suit. he hasn’t really talked about it, just taken for granted that you’re still bona-fide, USDA-prime human being, but you see the way he hesitates, the way he’s hearing zhang’s words just like you have been all this time.

“okay.” it’s careful, and quiet, and he leans back in what you’re sure he thinks is a great play at nonchalance. “okay, that’s—that’s a thing.”

“kepler’s voice,” you grit out, and it punches out between your teeth like a flood that you can’t bite your lips tight enough to stem, “i hear him at night and he talks to me and says shit and i _know,_ it sounds crazy and i know it’s not really him—or at least i’m pretty sure it’s not him because he’s across the fucking station and there’s no way he’s in there with me at night—”

“jacobi, that’s—”

“and _fuck,_ it sounds like he’s talking on the overhead but that can’t be right, right? hera would,” you stagger to a stop, suck in a breath, “hera would notice that, right?”

the look on eiffel’s face when you finally glance at him is wrath and fury enough to shake the gods, to eat the dear listeners alive, star and all but—but you can only see the slant of his eyebrows and the set of his jaw when he tilts his head back to glare at the ceiling, at the camera set into the corner of the room with enough vehemence to melt carbon fiber. the lights flicker off and on and you have a moment where you’re sure you can feel the bed’s strap bite into your stomach and this is the end, this is you falling to bits and falling apart and you’ve been in your bunk this _entire_ time, one great big never-ending nightmare—

“jacobi,” he says—swears it like a promise, an oath—and looks you right in the eye, “it won’t _ever_ happen again.”

you laugh at him then, because what the fuck? he’s got alien blood but he’s not the fucking chosen one, he can’t just will your crazy away by _wanting_ it hard enough, by giving enough of a fuck—but it stops. one day, another, the next and you had forgotten how loud _silence_ was, the murmur of static settling around you like a second skin. the station bumps and creaks and the star is purple behind your eyelids, but in the end you know him better than you know yourself, know just how long he can hold that pause—

over the speakers, at your back, against your neck, in your head: “You know this is your fault, don’t you, Daniel?”

you think the truth tastes a lot like blood. “i know.”

**Author's Note:**

> it's rough, but i like it, and that's a welcome enough surprise that it's all i can ask for.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [when every noise appals me (podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11765076) by [mothwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothwrites/pseuds/mothwrites)




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